At this morning\u2019s Stafford-Covey Return to Flight Task Group meeting, NASA has been told they have met \u2013 or are in the advanced process of meeting \u2013 the Columbia Accident Investigation Board recommendations. <\/p>\n
However, \u201cDirect Line Authority\u201d was noted several times, basically handing over all responsibility to NASA on safety issues and unknown outstanding issues.\n<\/p>\n
The Flight Readiness Review (FRR) will give the \u201cabsolute\u201d launch date \u2013 with the finalisation of reviews, such as debris concerns, coming to a close in the coming days.<\/font><\/p>\n The Task Group will meet again on June 20 \u2013 with three issues remaining, although they are happy that all recommendations of the CAIB Report have been met, or are in a state of being passed.<\/font><\/p>\n Veteran astronauts Thomas Stafford and Richard Covey lead the Task Group and are yet to fully address the show-stopping issue of debris strikes on the Orbiter during launch. The largest concern being from Ice, Frost or Slush \u2013 created from the loading of super-cold propellants into the External Tank \u2013 breaking off during assent and hitting the Orbiter\u2019s Thermal Protection System.<\/font><\/p>\n This proved to be fatal \u2013 when foam from the ET hit the left wing of Columbia on STS-107 \u2013 leading to super-hot gasses tearing into the Orbiter on re-entry.<\/font><\/p>\n Discovery was mated with its new ET (ET-121) yesterday in the Vehicle Assembly Building, ready for roll-out on Sunday or early next week.<\/font><\/p>\n Quotes from the meeting will be available within the next 24 hours.<\/font><\/p>\n Space Technology (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At this morning\u2019s Stafford-Covey Return to Flight Task Group meeting, NASA has been told they have met \u2013 or are in the advanced process of meeting \u2013 the Columbia Accident Investigation Board recommendations. However, \u201cDirect Line Authority\u201d was noted several times, basically handing over all responsibility to NASA on safety issues and unknown outstanding issues. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42377"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42377"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42377\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}